Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

COMMENTS TEMPORARILY CLOSED - MIGRATING FROM HALOSCAN/ECHO TO DISQUS
Old comments migrated to Disqus, currently working outtechnical issues

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Misadventures In Computer Technology

The other day I was browsing at various flat-panel computer monitors. Had the idea of upgrading to a 19-inch. There's a problem: monitors at that size are designed so that they optimal setting is 1280x1024 pixels. This means that reducing the screen resolution to 1024x768 results in smudged-looking fonts. Using ClearType settings in Windows XP doesn't fix this.

Why do I want the lower resolution? Because at 1280x1024 the fonts are too small to read without straining - unless I get an unusually large monitor (24" at the very least). But Internet Explorer fonts cannot be adjusted this way. Text size can be adjusted from within IE, but this will change only some of the font sizes of online text. So a flat panel monitor doesn't seem to be in my immediate future.